Saturday, November 30, 2013

New tools (I)

I have now in my possession all the basic
equipment necessary for professional movie-making.

It took me three nights to master the basics
of the Canon 5D mark 3, which is a pleasant surprise. I expected three
weeks at least. As stated it is a piece of advanced technology to rival a space
station, but in spite of that you can take great photos and films using the
manual settings, which I am usually going to do. The quality of the images is
just phenomenal, but don’t ask me to compare lenses and stuff, at least not
yet. I will never focus on the technical side of filmmaking more than I have
to.

This camera is so versatile and gives you so
many choices that you work pretty much in whatever way you want, and change
your approach at will as you go along.

I have procured a new laptop, Asus G750JH
with 32 GB of memory. We call it The Beast, or The Monster, a computer more
than powerful enough to serve the needs of an independent filmmaker. To say it
has top specs is a vast understatement. The graphic card is too powerful and
new to be registered on Adobe’s list over such cards. It will become a part of
that list in the coming months and stay on it for years.

I have become a part of Adobe’s Creative
Cloud, a move that gives me access to all Adobe’s programs/apps, among them
Premiere and After Effects. That alone is a dream come true.

The Zoom H6 handy portable sound recorder is
still in the unopened box.

So are the Metz Mecalight 480 and other
stuff. I approach this slowly but confident.

Once again, and I can’t stress this enough,
they, and whatever technical or expensive «wonder» you procure are just tools,
the potential, not the execution. They are not a magic wand, but the means for
the artist, the creative human being to do his or her thing.

Quote of the night

«The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.»
Steve Biko

Quote of nights to come

«The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently».Friedrich Nietzsche

Quote from the grayest of days

«How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?»